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The Vast Polar Structure around the Milky Way

Description:

Animated version of Figure 5 in Pawlowski et al. (2012):

The vast polar structure – VPOS – about the MW in Cartesian coordinates. The movie rotates the view over 360º, adding different objects around the Milky Way galaxy. The y-axis points towards the Galactic north pole. The 11 classical satellites are shown as yellow dots, the 13 new satellites are represented by the smaller green dots, young halo globular clusters are plotted as blue squares. The red curves connect the anchor points of streams of stars and gas, the (light-red) shaded regions illustrating the planes defined by these and the Galactic centre. Note that the stream coordinates are magnified by a factor of 3 to ease the comparison. The obscuration-region 10º around the Milky Way disc is given by the horizontal grey areas. In the centre, the Milky Way disc orientation (edge-on) is shown by a short horizontal cyan line. One can clearly see when the view is edge-on to the VPOS: The extend of all types of objects becomes minimal, also the streams align preferentially with this structure. From standard dark matter cosmology, a much more spheroidal distribution of objects around the Milky Way is expected. We therefore propose the satellite galaxies of the Milky Way to be Tidal Dwarf Galaxies.